“That’s such a cute age.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Great, so…” He gave her a perfunctory smile, then wrote something on a prescription tablet, murmuring as he scribbled. “Let’s get aggressive and start the tricyclic four times a day for the postpartum depression. You can go with the generic, if you like, or we have some Elavil samples to get you started. Then we’ll also get you some antianxiety medicine you can take on an as-needed basis.”
“Cool, thank you.”
Maura Grove (now known as “Melanie Garnett”) rose and extended her hand to take the prescription, but the doctor hesitated for a moment. He looked up at Maura as though he were seeing her for the first time. “You will call me, Miss Garnett, if there are any unexpected side effects? I can count on you to do that?”
Maura told him not to worry, he could count on her, then she snatched the prescription out of his hand, turned, and got the hell out of there.
On the trip back to the safe house, driving her new government-issue Ford Focus, crossing unfamiliar tree-lined streets bathed in morning sunlight, consulting a map provided by the Marshal Service, Maura wondered what that last comment was all about. Did Reichman not trust her around her own child? Did the doctor think she was going to do something psychotic like drive herself and her kid into the lake? A single mother mysteriously appears in a small town. Edgy, nervous, reclusive, she doesn’t show her face much except to go out to get more drugs. Who could blame people for being suspicious?
Maura felt another craving for a cigarette coming on as she turned onto her street.
She pulled in to her driveway and threw it into park, reaching into the glove box and rooting out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. One last soldier was buried in the flattened package. She guiltily lit up and puffed the stale cancer stick, feeling shame for not being able to quit, for her kid, for her own health. Her hands shook furiously as she smoked.
Screw it! What was she worried about? Some faceless serial killer would probably bump her off long before lung cancer had a chance to set in. She gazed through the windshield at her squat little brick town house. The home was built in the 1980s but looked as though it had seen better days. The wood trim was chipped, the chimney in bad need of tuck-pointing, the haphazard landscaping mostly dead or dying. The safe house, they called it, which was rich. There was nothing safe about it.
Maura smoked and trembled and ruminated another moment until she noticed the neighbor lady watching her with furrowed brow behind the window of an adjacent house. Vivian Cansino, a large, hirsute Italian matron, had lost her husband to a stroke three years ago. Now she was the only saving grace for Maura in this horrible new exile. Two days ago, the older woman had welcomed Maura to the neighborhood with open arms and a baking pan full of cheese manicotti, and it hadn’t taken long for Maura to realize that this sweet-natured old lady had a heart as big as her gigantic bosom.
In just two short days, in fact, Vivian had won over Maura enough to entrust the woman with Aaron during a quick trip to the doctor.
Maura snubbed out her cigarette, climbed out of the car, and skulked up the Cansino’s walk.
“Don’t tell me, something’s wrong,” the old woman fretted, peering out her screen door with Aaron propped on her massive hip. The baby was suckling a rubber teething ring and looked happily oblivious.
Maura managed a smile as she approached the porch. “Nope…just…better living through chemistry.”
Vivian pursed her lips for a moment, then softened. “Your little angel was just absolutely perfect. Just one little mess in his onesy, got it cleaned right up.”
Maura gently shoveled her baby up into her arms. “Dere’s my big man. Thanks, Vivian.”
“Are you okay, sweetheart?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
Maura let out a sigh. “Just a little…tired.”
A long pause as Vivian regarded Maura for a moment. “Come in for a second.”
“Thanks…but I need to get him down for a nap.”
“It’ll just take a second, honey.”
Maura shrugged and followed the portly woman into the cozy warren of knickknacks and country antiques. The Cansino house smelled of potpourri and Ben-Gay, a pleasing mélange that reminded Maura of her grandmother’s house in Seattle. Vivian led Maura into the kitchen.
“Put the little duffer on the floor for a minute,” the woman urged.
Maura set the baby down on a braided rug.
“Before my husband Bill retired, he was a transit cop in Detroit.” The big gal was reaching up to a cabinet over the Norge as she spoke. She pulled down a wooden case about the size of a lunchbox.
“I have cousins back there,” Maura commented absently, looking at the case, hands shaking.
The old woman handed Maura the case. The varnish was rubbed off. It smelled like cedar and oil. “You’ve got some troubles,” Vivian said. “I can tell when somebody’s fur is up. The world on their shoulders. Nice girl like you.”
“Vivian, the thing is—”
The old woman raised an arthritic hand, interrupting. “I don’t want to know any details. I just want you to take this. It’s better than any pill.”
Maura flipped the latch and looked inside the case. Nestled in a molded concavity was a .22 caliber handgun, its dark blue steel shank as oily and smooth as sharkskin. It made Maura’s neck prickle with gooseflesh.
The old lady smiled sadly, her gold incisor gleaming. “If you want to know how to use it, I can give you some lessons.”
Grove gripped the arm rests of the Blackhawk as the aircraft descended through layers of turbulent clouds. Clad in a flight jacket he had dug up at Langley, his body hastily bandaged, he felt as though he were in some kind of metaphysical free fall, and it wasn’t merely the gravitational forces working on the helicopter. Grove felt as though he was about to cross some kind of Rubicon, a point of no return. One thing seemed certain: the cycle was coming around again.
He looked down through the slice of grimy windshield at the landscape rushing under them: the snaking black waterway of Pickman Creek, dark as motor oil in the overcast daylight, bending its way around the wasted terrain of scorched-out dumps. Behind them, to the west, the gray skyline of St. Louis stretched across the horizon.
The chopper pitched. Grove dug his fingernails into the padding. The engine yowled and the aircraft banked over a patchwork of soybean fields. Grove saw the intersection of Highway 20 and Old Six Mile Road about a quarter mile away, a cluster of emergency vehicles like Matchbox toys circling an old barn, all the roof flashers spinning with the mad frenzy of Christmas tree lights.
“There it is!” Grove pointed at all the vehicles in the distance.
“Copy that, bro! Hold on!” The Blackhawk pilot, a wiry surf punk from Redondo Beach, barely out of his twenties, fresh from his second tour in Iraq, dressed in a camo suit and helmet, wrestled the chopper toward a flat plateau of bare earth just east of the barn. The salvage yard got bigger and bigger as the Blackhawk descended. The junk swirled and roiled in the chopper’s backwash, car hoods flipping up into the air, wadded newspapers tumbling in every direction.
The chopper sank to the earth, and the skids hit terra firma, rattling Grove’s molars. The entire craft groaned as the engine revved, and a series of beeps and bells signaled the end of the journey.
Grove struggled out of his harness, then climbed out of the chopper.
He stood there for a moment, getting the lay of the land, his pants legs flapping. His eyes burned from the dust and exhaust, and he could barely hear somebody calling his name over the ringing in his ears. About a hundred yards away, dozens of CSI people were already carrying Styrofoam hazmat containers out of the barn and across the gravel lot. Resembling macabre carryout food cartons, the white containers meant only one thing to the initiated: body parts. Ribbons of yellow crime scene tape fluttered in the breeze, crisscrossing the barn’s fence, the entrance, the boarded windows. Ca
meras flashed silver in the dreary gray light, and a mixture of plainclothes cops, Bureau suits, and uniforms milled around the parking lot, some of them writing on clipboards, others getting metrics on the ground with tape measures or brushing surfaces for latent prints.
“Agent Grove!”
Big Bill Menner, his craggy face aglow with excitement, his houndstooth sport coat straining with the girth of his belly, came running up, ducking under the back currents coming off the chopper’s rotor. He wore cotton booties over his shoes and had rubber gloves on. “Looks like we hit the mother lode!” he hollered over the rotor noise.
“Hundred percent it’s the Ripper?”
Menner nodded. “Thousand percent! Wait’ll you get a load of the physical—come on!”
The beefy field agent turned and ushered Grove down a rocky slope of crabgrass, then across the gravel lot toward the barn. They passed throngs of white-suited lab people and evidence techs taking step impressions. They passed another group doing a methane probe, poking the ground with instruments, searching the edge of the building for any hidden remains. Another cluster of technicians crouched in the shadows under one of the windows, spraying the glass with ninhydrin aerosol for prints. At least a dozen plainclothes detectives or field agents milled around the inner and outer perimeters, bagging, dusting, measuring, and notating. The country air buzzed with the smell of ammonia and nerves.
“Is Cedric here yet?” Grove asked, sidestepping a woman in a lab coat.
“On his way. So is Geisel.”
“Who was first on the scene?”
Menner explained how the salvage yard owner, Massamore, had heard shots being fired, then called 911. The state police sent a trooper, who found three fresh victims stacked outside. “Right up yonder,” Menner said, pointing at the white tape outlines on the hard stony ground by an ancient water trough. The three corpses were neatly arrayed, side by side. “Found a lot more goodies inside,” the big man went on. “No sign of the perp. Won’t be long now, though. Considering the time of death on the vics outside, our boy couldn’t have gotten far. Salvage yard owner got a good look at him, got a great sketch, positive ID. It’s all good. Just a matter of time.”
Grove nodded. “Who is he?”
“Name’s Splet, a local.”
“Spell it.”
“S-P-L-E-T. Henry Alan Splet. White, late forties, father of four. Cameraman for the local ABC affiliate.”
Grove stopped just outside the entrance to the barn, pondering the name. Henry Alan Splet. The name had no resonance, no effect. It set off no eerie feelings of déjà vu. No sense of cosmic meaning, no inchoate connections to ancient struggles, no vibrations whatsoever. Henry Alan Splet was the ultimate everyman, the proverbial face in the crowd, the ordinary schlub. In fact, there was something about this lack of resonance that bothered Grove. Henry Alan Splet was a nobody, a human black hole, and maybe that was the most terrifying revelation of them all. For a man to be capable of pinning open a victim’s eyelids while—
“You okay?”
Big Bill Menner’s voice brought Grove back to earth, and Grove rubbed his face. “Yeah, sorry. Just taking it all in. I assume you got the trooper on ice for Q&A?”
“Yeah, well, that’s another thing.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Trooper’s just a kid, couldn’t be more than twenty-something.”
“Yeah, and…?”
“He’s kinda rattled. What he found in there…it put the hurt on him, messed with his head.” Menner paused in front of the double doors. “Here we are.” He pulled a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and handed them to Grove, then pulled a pair of paper booties out and handed them over. “I think you’ll see what I mean when you see this place.”
Grove sighed and slipped the paper booties over his shoes, then looked up again at the barn’s entrance.
The double doors, crisscrossed with yellow police tape, hung by the threads of broken, rusted hinges. Mold and bird droppings clung to the worm-eaten timbers. The doors looked as though they were welded shut with a patina of age, stuck together in the aspic of decay. They also looked strangely imposing, like a drawbridge sealing off some haunted, bewitched fortress.
For the briefest moment imaginable, Grove flashed on a line from the Inferno. In the story, Dante Alighieri sees a legend at the threshold of the underworld, warning off all who dare enter.
“Lay Down All Hope, You That Go In By Me.”
“After you, Agent Grove,” Big Bill Menner said at last, gesturing at the double doors.
TWENTY-FOUR
It took a while for Grove to discover the clippings, and the secrets contained within their wadded remnants. He was too busy taking in the banquet of evidence strewn about the barn, the amazing array of human dementia made solid. When he first entered the dark, cobweb-covered space, for instance, he immediately noticed the weird way the bales of straw were arranged across the floor. He had to step back for a moment in order to finally identify the purpose of the oddly shaped rows: Like a child’s playroom, they formed imaginary chambers, secret hallways, private hiding places. Evidence flags riddled these areas where blood from multiple sources—of all different ages and stages of decay—had formed droplets and streaks and spatters. An expert would be able to recreate a death chronology from all those stains with the reliability of a linguist translating a text.
As he slowly walked through the airless, hidden world of a madman, gazing at everything all at once, Grove wished he had his equipment, a camera, and maybe a digital recorder. The barn was as silent as a library. A pair of forensic technicians, the only other souls currently in the place, quietly worked in one corner with an ultraviolet scanning device. Purple light pulsed. Menner followed Grove at a respectful distance, softly indicating key pieces of evidence.
“Horse stalls,” the big man murmured at one point, tipping his head at the rows of wooden enclosures lining the barn’s east and west walls.
Grove paused to take in the rows of stalls. The simple wood-framed cubicles were lined with moldy hay, and some featured the names of former equine occupants embossed on silver-plated plaques affixed to the doors: Angel, Nurse White, Circus Lady, Mister Klister, Arturo the Artist, and The Hillbilly. All the names had that whimsical tone that horse names often have—maybe they had been racing horses, maybe show horses. Everything was coated with a thick layer of dust and grime, and the air smelled of chemical rot and quicklime.
Upon closer inspection, Grove saw that many of these horse stalls had been doctored, cryptic numbers spray painted across boarded doors, the feeding troughs filled with garbage, tires, old bottles, shoes, and discarded articles of clothing. Somewhere down in the tangled ganglia of Grove’s subconscious he recognized this honeycomb of vaults as the product of a madman’s delusional world: a territory of the imagination, a locus dementia.
“We left the last one pretty much how we found it,” Agent Menner was saying, indicating the last stall on the left where tiny red evidence flags spread in profusion off the base of the doorway. Red strings connected some of the flags with key blood smears, resembling a cat’s cradle of forensic minutiae. The odor of formaldehyde hung in the air like a curtain. “Kept his collection in there.”
Grove felt a chill pinch his spine as he approached the doorway to the stall marked 213 in black spray paint—a feeling not unlike biting down on crushed ice. He looked in and saw the tawdry, blood-spattered furniture illuminated by one bare hanging lightbulb, a thin film of print dust shimmering on most of the surfaces. Grove saw the road cases, the trays of surgical instruments, and the bottles of chemicals. But mostly he saw the pictures on the walls.
“Ophthalmic retractors,” Grove muttered, flexing his hand inside its rubber glove.
“What was that?” Menner asked.
“Pictures on the walls.” Grove hovered in the doorway, staring. “The eye thing. Forced the victims to watch. We were right about that one.”
“You were right.”
&nbs
p; “Very sick individual, this guy.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s in the minifridge?”
“Don’t bother looking, IBI took it all to the lab. Body parts.”
Grove kept staring at a poorly focused photograph of a dilated pupil, shiny with terror, wrenched open by razor-thin wire clamps. “What kind of body parts?”
“Eyeballs, mostly.”
With a nod Grove stepped inside the cell, then turned slowly around, 360 degrees, in order to take it all in, hoping there might be some detail that would hasten the man’s capture. This was a critical time in any manhunt, the point at which the beast has been flushed out of hiding, the most dangerous hours. Desperation sets in. The killer often goes on one last rampage. If Grove could absorb some tiny shred that would help find Splet, some infinitesimal detail, something specific, lives might be saved.
He turned and scanned and searched…until his gaze fell on the pile of litter.
At first glance the trash appeared random, just an assortment of wadded newspaper and crumpled documents shoved into the corner. But the more Grove looked at the papers, the more his gut tightened with recognition. The wads of paper lay within a circle of ash. Faint symbols rimmed the circle. Numbers. Pictograms, perhaps. Some of them scrawled in blood, some in soot or grime. Grove knelt and drew a rubber-tipped index finger across the ash.
It was still warm.
“What is it?” Menner wanted to know.
“Not sure.” Grove picked up one of the wadded clumps of paper and opened it.
He stared at the wrinkled page torn out of a Time magazine. The headline said, “Superstar Profiler Zeroes in on Latest Quarry.” Grove read the first few lines of the text, the bit about the “famed FBI criminologist” claiming he is about to nab another killer.
Gooseflesh trickled down Grove’s back.
“What’s the matter?”
Agent Menner’s voice faded in Grove’s ears as he picked up another piece of paper. This one was a Xerox. It was made off a microfiche machine—a grainy clipping of a social announcement from the Alexandria Arts Weekly—showing Grove and Maura one year ago, on their wedding day, arm in arm, smiling stiffly for the photographer.
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